Season 7, Episode 2: Are We History? Historians in the Age of AI – Part II
Reverb Effect
In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the ways in which graduate students and faculty in the humanities have been responding to the rise of AI. Last year, the University of Michigan’s history department put on workshops to begin discussing the impact of AI on teaching and learning and these first two episodes of the new season of the podcast seek to follow up on those conversations. In this episode we had a chance to talk to multiple graduate students and faculty to get a sense for some of the challenges they have encountered in the classroom, how they have reworked their approaches...
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Season 7, Episode 1: Are We History? Historians in the Age of AI – Part I
Reverb Effect
In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the ways in which undergraduates in the humanities have been responding to the rise of AI. Last year, the University of Michigan’s history department put on workshops to begin discussing the impact of AI on teaching and learning and these first two episodes of the new season of the podcast seek to follow up on those conversations. In this episode we had a chance to talk to Cameron Amiot and Arjit Agarwal, two undergraduates involved in organizing a roundtable discussion on AI in the department, as well as Ella Hengeveld, the president of the...
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Season 6, Episode 4: Conservatism on College Campuses: A Conversation with Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd and Sophie Wunderlich
Reverb Effect
In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the long history of conservative student activism on American college campuses. The popular image of the 1960s student is a protester against the Vietnam War or for civil rights. That same decade also saw the rise of right-wing student groups like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We explore how national leaders and donors built these groups, what they called grassroots organizing, and how they copied the tactics of the left. We also follow the students who later became prominent figures in the Republican Party,...
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Season 6, Episode 3: Making Kin
Reverb Effect
In this episode of Reverb Effect, we visit KIN: Us and Our Kinds, an exhibit of paintings, comics, and sculpture by historian and artist Rafael Neis, and ask what happens when creative practice becomes a way of doing history. Drawing on ancient rabbinic stories, KIN explored how kinship, species, and bodies were once imagined as unstable and open to change. We talk with Neis about bringing art and scholarship together, teaching history through hands-on experiments, the medical history of classifying bodies, and how discomfort in front of art can start conversations. Rafael Neis is Hermann...
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Season 6, Episode 2: “When They Come Back to Communities, You See Life:" Reparations in Uganda
Reverb Effect
In this episode of Reverb Effect, we follow the journey of Ugandan cultural artifacts from removal to repatriation, and what happens when they return home. Tracing historical materials and their layered afterlives as they moved from colonial Africa to the Cambridge Museum and back to the Uganda National Museum, we explore how collecting trajectories stripped objects of meaning, and how present-day recovery raises complex questions about belonging and identity. Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State...
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Season 6, Episode 1: Capturing Change to Build a Future: The Woodbridge Oral History Archive
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What happens when a neighborhood tells its own story? In this episode of Reverb Effect, we step into Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood to hear firsthand accounts of resilience, memory, and change – from postwar life and the 1967 uprising to art, activism, and shifting pressures of today. Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University. Richard Bachmann is a resident of Woodbridge and a PhD candidate in History. Angie Gaabo is a resident of Woodbridge and the former director of the Woodbridge...
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Season 5, Episode 6: "Does It Matter?": Legacies of the First World War
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Nationalism. Emerging technology. Militarization. Destroyed bodies. Total war. In this episode, three historians reconsider the dominant themes of the First World War—which are as relevant today as they were a century ago. Cheyenne Pettit studies Canadian and British conflicts over the treatment of venereal disease during World War One. Matthew Hershey's research explores meanings and experiences of soldiers’ suicide in the First World War. And Lediona Shahollari focuses on the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange during the partition of those two states in the aftermath of the Great...
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Season 5, Episode 5: Not Just for Scholars: Democratizing the Archives
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Archives are central to the work of historians. But they are not just for scholars. In this episode, we talk with an archivist, an archival theorist, and a historian, all working to democratize these spaces, what they hold, and who can access them. Professor Patricia Garcia will help us think about the archives through a critical lens. Archivist Brian Williams will help us understand how to build an archive essentially from scratch. And Professor Stephen Berrey will help us understand what role the public can play in archival endeavors.
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Season 5, Episode 4: Constructed Categories: Syriac Christians and the Immigration Act of 1924
Reverb Effect
One person, missionary EW McDowell, influenced the fate of Syriac Christians ahead of the US Immigration Act of 1924. In this episode, Hannah Roussel interviews James Wolfe about McDowell, whose writings and testimony before Congress opened up the dialectics about the nature of the category “Asiatic.”
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Season 5, Episode 3: “Peace to the World”: Lessons from the Soviet Antiwar Underground
Reverb Effect
Alexander McConnell talks with Olga Medvedkova, a Soviet antiwar activist whose arrest garnered worldwide attention in 1983. In light of the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, what can we learn from Medvedkova and the Soviet peace movement?
info_outlineIn what ways can a look be unsettling? Intimidating? Might it be dangerous? How does one study the history of an act so fleeting, and so difficult to record?
PhD candidate Molly Brookfield studies the history of men's harassment of women in public places, in other words, street harassment. She’s interested in behaviors like catcalling or ogling, actions often considered trivial or even complimentary, rather than overtly violent or threatening.
We’ll uncover the history of the more insidious behaviors men often perform in public space. Behaviors that leave no visible mark yet have the power to disrupt a woman’s daily life. But is this really a story of the past? We’ll consider the alarming persistence of such behaviors, and their transition into an accepted, sometimes even normal aspect of urban life.